If he goes, MFN will be his undoing. Last year Lord and others crafted an executive order tying renewal of MFN to ““overall significant progress’’ on human rights in China. Lord sold the strategy as a smart compro-mise between competing human-rights and business concerns. This week Clinton is expected to report that Beijing has complied – grudgingly and barely – and to renew MFN status, perhaps attaching a few symbolic sanctions. To quiet human-rights activists, Clinton is likely to embrace a House proposal for a bipartisan human-rights commission and to recommend a code of conduct for U.S. firms trading in China.
Then, somehow, Clinton must abandon MFN as a human-rights tool. The compromise Lord touted last year has caused Washington to lose face, not only with China but with other Asian countries as well. ““There’s a perception in Asia that the United States speaks in demanding and instructive terms,’’ says an Asian diplomat in Washington. ““The Americans are out of touch with the ever more confident and prosperous countries in Asia.''
With his China policy discredited, Lord – of Yale, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the son of a Pillsbury heiress and the husband of a noted Chinese-American writer – is tarnished, and he knows it. A recent leaked memo of his to Secretary of State Warren Christopher should have been titled ““The Diplomat’s Lament.’’ ““A series of American measures, threatened or employed, risk corroding our positive image [in Asia],’’ he warned, ““giving ammunition to those charging we are an international nanny, if not bully.''
He has a point. Clinton’s vision of a prosperous, unified Pacific community, laid out at what Lord calls a ““historic’’ summit meeting of Asian leaders in Seattle last fall, has become clouded. North Korea continues to develop a nuclear-weapons program while the world huffs its disapproval. Japan’s trade surplus with the United States jumped 25 percent in March as American officials bickered among themselves and the Japanese asked, ““Who’s in charge?’’ Indonesia and Malaysia hate Washington’s promotion of workers’ rights. Singapore still seethes at the reaction to the caning of an American teenager. Washington is angry with Taiwan for trading in tigers, and with Thailand for selling weapons technology to Libya. Asians complain that for each country, U.S. policy gets reduced to a single issue.
That, Lord insists, is precisely what he has tried to avoid. His strategy on China, he says, has been to ““move MFN out of the center of the debate.’’ Last year’s executive order was drafted so that the Chinese could easily meet the conditions required to retain MFN. ““We are neither naive nor arrogant,’’ says Lord. But for an experienced China hand, he made a basic error. He misjudged how touchy China would be about making concessions to barbarians on the eve of a succession crisis – Deng Xiaoping is a frail 89. For nervous Chinese leaders, the very extent (but inequality) of the economic boom is not a reason to grant political freedoms but a compelling argument for clamping the lid tight on potential unrest.
The administration took this bad hand and made it worse. Economics officials sniped constantly at the MFN/human-rights linkage, strengthening Chinese intransigence. But Lord couldn’t even control his own team. (He was chairman of the administration’s interagency group on China policy, a position he recently lost to deputy national-security adviser Samuel Berger.) In February, just before Christopher and Lord arrived in Beijing, Lord’s State Department colleague John Shattuck, assistant secretary for human rights, met in Beijing with noted dissident Wei Jingsheng. The Chinese were enraged; Lord himself had to defend it uncomfortably. To some in Washington, it looked like a classic Lord flip-flop. During his tenure as ambassador to Beijing in the late 1980s, human-rights groups thought he did not give high priority to political freedom. Then, after the Tiananmen massacre, he broke ranks with George Bush and his national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, realists both; returned to the moralist corridors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and railed against the butchers of Beijing.
Lord argues that muddled policy is a product of muddled times. ““How do you order your priorities?’’ he asks. ““It’s more complex to make trade-offs [between economic, security and human-rights interests] than it was during the cold war.’’ He points to bright spots; the administration is moving toward normalization of relations with Vietnam. Lord is too loyal to offer the best defense – that he had to implement a policy driven by the nature of this administration. ““Linkage’’ tried to split the difference between human rights and economics; it was long on words, muddied in principle and short on decisive action, like most of President Clinton’s foreign-policy initiatives. And it assumed, wrongly, that Congress would risk MFN – and $40 billion in trade – in the name of human rights.
Lord could claim it was his job to understand the Chinese; others are paid to understand Congress, to calibrate the lobbies for and against particular policies and craft them accordingly. But as has happened so often in this presidency, the merest threat of a battle at home has been allowed to complicate policies that should be simple and clear enough to travel an ocean. True, Lord has been so involved in China policy for so long that he cannot escape accountability for this year’s mess. But perhaps there’s an old Chinese proverb whose gist is, ““When there’s weevils in the rice, you don’t just shout at the cook.’’ If there isn’t, Win Lord must be thinking, there should be.
